3. Title and description tag create the first impression

When making a website, a lot of attention always goes to the look & feel of the website in general and to the homepage in particular. While this is certainly very important, it's not true that you need to do this in order to 'make a good first impression'.

For more than half of your visitors, their first contact with you is not your homepage. Or any other page of your website, for that matter.

The first contact, the first impression, is made by the title and description tag shown in Google.

4. How can you find out what your title and description tags are?

There are lots of seo-programmes that can do this for you. But there's also Google. Just type in 'site:' followed by your domain name and you'll get the complete list of the title and description tags of all your pages.

On the international website of Citroën, there's room for improvement. The title tags are clearly not specific enough. For the description tag, they seem to have written some fluffy marketing nonsense and used that for most pages.

7. How to track down doubles in your title or description tags?

Google doesn't like title tags or description tags that are the same for more than one page of your website. It's clear why: Google uses the title and description tags to find out whether or not a page has unique content.

The first thing you need to do is make sure every page of your website has a unique title and description tag.

The Google Webmaster Tools can help you track down doubles in your title or description tags. Log in to Google Webmaster Tools and select your website (or add your website if you haven't done that yet).

Go to the left menu, click on ‘Diagnostics’ and then on ‘HTML suggestions’. The report on this page gives you access to double tags and it also shows you the title and description tags that are too long or too short.

Do you know of any other best practices, tools or studies on the importance of the title or description tag? Please share them in the comments.